Hillia:
In my office, the code for this is 'Let's take this offline'...in other words, you and I can meet separately to discuss this, but right now we're dropping it and moving on.

Missy2U:
We had a coworker who would whine and complain every single meeting. We are all THRILLED she's retiring at the end of the month!!

The only way we've found to shut her down is to tell her to take it off line, or we break in to the conversation and ask the manager, "Are we done?" so that we can get off the call and get back to work. That seems to have helped as well.

bopper:
When we get too technical at a status meeting, someone will say "Let's take this off line" (discuss it elsewhere).What you need is someone with an agenda to run the meeting. Tell that person you can only stay for the 30 minutes because otherwise you will fall behind in your workload and you don't think it best use of company resources to try to get Granite to understand something he doesn't need to understand.

LA lady:

--- Quote from: artk2002 on December 02, 2012, 01:05:31 AM ---Now, can you help me figure out to how to keep my cool when someone says "why are we doing/not doing X? There are very good reasons why this is the wrong path." I wouldn't mind, except that he does it 3-6 months after we've made the decision and he said nothing when the decision was first made. Yes, it's the same person.--- End quote ---

Not in the workplace, but still a similar situation: Years ago, a friend and co-member of a club was a nice person but ALWAYS a negative Nellie. And no matter what anyone had done, the first word out of Nellie's mouth were,"But why didn't you do so-and-so." It was like a slap to the people who had done the work.

I began answering her, every single time, with, "Nellie, where were you when the vote was taken/ the decision was made/ ideas were solicited/ the work was being done?" I always said it cheerfully and with a smile, but I no longer listened to her implied criticism, and I turned it back to her failure to provide useful input at a useful time.

One day, my committee members and I had just completed a large project that was a lot of work and on public display as part of a significant community event. Nellie shows up just in time for the working hours to be closing, and again she starts, "Why didn't you. . . I know, where was I when the work was being done." She then laughed at herself, and I never heard those words directed to me again.

bopper:

--- Quote from: artk2002 on December 02, 2012, 01:05:31 AM ---Now, can you help me figure out to how to keep my cool when someone says "why are we doing/not doing X? There are very good reasons why this is the wrong path." I wouldn't mind, except that he does it 3-6 months after we've made the decision and he said nothing when the decision was first made. Yes, it's the same person.--- End quote ---

I work in software and you are either a key person to the process or you are not. If you are a key person, then you have to approve the requirements for the software. If don't agree, then we work it out until you do. Then you are saying you commit to building this software to these specs. But if you are not a key person and say something at the end about the software, most likely we will ignore you because this is not your project. We would say that we have baselined these requirements and gotten customer concurrence and this is what we are doing and that if they were interested they should have provided comments earlier in the process. Also it is good to document the decisions you made so if they said "Why are you going down this path" you can show where you considered other paths but chose this one based on various reasons.

However, if someone did that alot and actually had good ideas, we would start including that person as a key person and made sure s/he signed off earlier on.